The European Court of Justice ruling, gives people the right to have information that is "irrelevant, outdated or otherwise inappropriate" to be removed from the results.

Many of the requests have been from criminals seeking to have records of convictions removed, people hit by scandals in the media or those whose character has been called into question.

The firm has vowed to inspect each of the requests and judge them on individual merits, but has made no promises about when the purging will take place.

Consuming

Google agreed to comply with the ruling, which was made in May after a Spanish man requested the right to have details of a house repossession 16 years ago, removed from Google Search results.

Google said the result of the case was "disappointing," but the task of wading through thousands of requests from Europeans, and the prospect of similar cases in other territories may prove troublesome and resource consuming for the web giant.